Whitman and Stevens

I spent my summers and painted where Walt Whitman very well may have composed many of his verses, on the Long Island bay beaches of East Hampton and Sag Harbor. I painted there with Paul Georges when I was a young painter. We would go out together and paint away the summer afternoons

I also knew his friend Fairfield Porter who with James Schuyler set all this all up for me in a way. This would all remain unknown to me till years after. I remember though the Porter still life I saw back then with the Stevens poetry book prominent in its composition and noted it. Schuyler later became a favorite poet.

Whitman used the Indian name Paumanok to describe the fish shape of the Island and I've used this name for many of my paintings.

I saw the shaping of the Romance Quest in my ealiest paintings coming from the darker deeper space to a surface and light, I saw my earliest paintings illustrating similar light and space as in Whitman.

The final phase of the Quest I speak of was a figure, to me the idea of the painting, what it would mean, what came to the surface and why it is so sharply outlined.

I worked for a very long time on this figure before it's first incarnation. It came in the beginning from the Greek vase and has an evolution through the western tradition of the line from Raphael to Ingres and Manet to Picasso and Matisse.

The American Walt Disney has a hand in my figure through the Disney artists influenced through the tradition and into the modern era.


I liked being an 80's artist the way the figure was simply stuck on over the landscape like a stamp. It causes a reversal of the background space and welds the pictorial planes.

While I was beginning my work I was reading Whitman waiting for good light or weather for painting on the bay beach. I would cut sunflowers from a farmers field and set them up beside the reeds which line the beach.

I was reading in the evenings the letters of Van Gogh and was astounded when I found that Vincent was as I reading Walt when he painted the sunflowers of his and that he was interested in the Universe that these particulars created and how they all were in rhythms similar to an eastern reality of a pantheistic creation which Whitman wrote of also.